Dumbest Things People Have Said About Your Chickens/Eggs/Meat

[The Yakima Kid]

True, my sister is celiac and it is less common than today's diets would seem to want people to think. But as I understand it gluten is an indigestible protein that has been rising in concentration as we have been breeding wheat and genetically modifying wheat to be more productive. I believe the concentration of gluten in modern wheat is 10x that of the heirloom or ancient grain versions... Not sure what my point is

I think your point is that farmers preferred to plant higher gluten wheat and rye because it was easier to make bread out of it. Almost all of our crop plants are significantly different than both their wild ancestors and their forms from two or three thousand years ago. That is sort of the point of agriculture - to allow more people to stay in one place and eat than hunting and gathering.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Blooie, I think you made some excellent points. I think really the gist of why yesterday was better than today is that real food is better than fake and/or adulterated food. You mentioned cigarettes. Though I am extremely anti-smoking and have lost many relatives and have more dying from emphysema/COPD now, yesterday's tobacco is not the same as today's. Today's is very chemical-laced and I think that is more what is killing folks than the actual tobacco itself.

Real vs Fake. I'm not an extremist, can't afford to be, have my own not-great-for-me stuff I like to eat occasionally, but we use real butter, not margarine and have for years. Real foods, unadulterated, natural and whole, forget the fat content. They just came out with studies that said that well rounded normal in fat diets were healthier for the heart and overall well-being than low calorie, low fat diets. Well, duh. We also grow more and more of our own food now and have started canning as well as freezing. We can't do it all, but we do as much as our bodies will allow us to at our ages and with my DH's disabilities. We live on a military pension so we have to do what we can to live by our own power. It's those folks who are scared of our eggs who will come to us for food when the you-know-what hits the fan and they can't buy food at the grocery stores. And they'll be a little disappointed, I'm afraid, and wish they'd thought ahead, not been so naive. JMHO and I'm sticking to it, LOL.

AAAAAARGH! Are you aware that bowel cancer used to be a young person's disease in the United States - and still is in Japan?

Bowel cancer became an old person's disease because of the introduction of two chemical additives into cooking fats - BHA and BHT.

Today's cigarettes have many additives blended into the tobacco to produce an even burn. However, smoking additive free Sherman's is not going to protect you from the bad effects of smoking.

Moderation is an excellent route.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

You may or may not find this interesting but in my genealogical research, I have copies of documents, of my Great, great, great grandfathers petition for his Civil War disability pension. It contains doctors reports and testimony from friends. The final paper is copies of my Great, great, great grandmothers letter to get her widows pension. The got $40 a month in 1906.

As for the food thing. I'm tired of folks who just will not listen. I'd tell them to drop dead but they probably will sooner than later. I've a friend who can only eat eggs from my birds without getting sick. Even Egglands Best make him sick.

What I hate about todays food is the taste or lack thereof. I've a recipe for Watermelon jelly but try to find any that have any flavor. I sometimes wonder if the reason I don't like certain foods is they don't taste the way they should.

Sorry if my interjection is out of line,

I wish you well folks,

Rancher, just got back from the farmers market, Hicks

I think there are sometimes seeds available for an old Russian/Bessarabian watermelon called something like Moon and Stars. It's pretty good. It has flavor, not just sweetness.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Well I'll play devils advocate. Folks ate less and did more. We were skinny cuz we didn't eat like we do today.

I'm ashamed to say I ate two helpings of DW's Beef Stroganagh (whatever) a little salad, a Nutty bar and jello for dinner.

Meals were much smaller back in the day. Folks did more for themselves back in the day. Not like now. You hire someone to clean your carpeting, wash your car.

I just read an article that inspite of all the safety things we have, injuries to children has NOT decreased.

However folks do live longer than back in the day too. Of course I'm not sure how much of what they do is really living. Too I just found out my great, great, great grandfather died at 62 of a cerebraly hemmorage but his wife lived til she was 85. Though the closer I get to 85 the younger it seems.

I really need to get off my bum and do more. My days begin late and end early.

How many breaks did YOU take today?

So what to do?

Oh and I forgot. FOLKS HAD MORE KIDS BACK IN THE DAY TOO!

I just about fell out of my chair laughing at this one.

My paternal grandmother's idea of breakfast:

Eggs, shredded wheat, several slices of bacon, toast with butter, and jam or jelly.

Lunch:

Ham or other meat, with the morning bacon grease often featuring in the gravy, along with corn, peas, carrots, or some other vegetable. Sometimes a green salad.

Dinner:

Like lunch, only often bigger. I can't even remember what all she cooked, but I know it swam in animal fats. Lots of deep frying.

The paternal relatives in Colorado eat very heavily and do ranch work. When we visited, they were still all getting together at great-grandmother's house (she had all of her descendant generations around her) and eating Sunday dinner on a table that they inserted quite a number of leaves into. There were something like 25 people around it every weekend (not everyone could always make it), and there was darn little room for the plates because of all of the food. They ate enough at Sunday dinner (which was really closer to lunch time) than I was used to eating in a week.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

Why do you think meals were smaller back in the day? Have you ever read an old cookbook? One written in the early 1900's? I have one published in 1919. The proposed menus there would give a modern nutritionist apoplexy. On the farms where there was heavy labor, there were often two breakfasts, a midday meal, and a relatively light evening meal. A lot of cream and butter, but not nearly as much sweet stuff. People were a lot more active. On the subject of hired help, up until WWI almost every household had some domestic help. Usually a girl to help in the kitchen and maybe a housekeeper of sorts. The housewife didn't do everything herself. And then of course the kids did chores.

Any household that could *afford* hired help had hired help. My grandmother was a teacher and a young wife; in the late 1910s-1920s in Washington state. It was the custom of the times for young married women who could afford to do so to hire in a "Swedish girl" or a "Norwegian girl" - young immigrant women (or daughters of immigrants) who might themselves be married and mothers - to come in at least once a week to help her in the house. Her mother-in-law had tons of kids and an enormous ranch house to run in Eastern Washington. She occasionally had day help and had very busy kids. I don't know if she ever had any full time live in help, but I do know she probably didn't get to sit down much.

Just cooking could be an ordeal. Rural wives longed for kerosene or gasoline stoves because they didn't heat the house the way a wood or coal range did. Summers could be unbearable, and there was a reason some kitchens were entirely separate buildings that were connected by a breezeway or not connected to the house at *all* in climates that didn't suffer from heavy snowfall or blizzards. Kitchen fires were fairly common. Apparently my paternal grandmother was almost as happy as she'd've been at the Second Coming when rural electrification finally reached her house circa the late 1950s - early 1960s and she could junk the coal heater and the kerosene stove for a nice oil burning Heatilator and an electric cook stove.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

A lot of people were slave owners in the U.S. back before the mid 1800s. Not the same thing as a servant, but they did have somebody help.

And a lot more people depended on the daytime occasional employment of a "Swedish girl", a "Norwegian girl", an "Irish girl", a "Polish girl", a "Negro woman" (ABSOLUTELY NO OFFENSE MEANT BY THIS TERM - IT WAS JUST THE ONE USED) or other help that might come several times a week, or only once or twice a month to help with special tasks such as flipping mattresses.

Darn few people owned slaves in the US at any time. As I understood it from reading history, fewer than 2% of southerners owned slaves, and many owned at most three or four. A number of slaves were actually the family members of, and owned by, free Blacks who had purchased them from their owners and were prevented by law from emancipating them.

Believe me, US history is doubling strange. The last slaves were Asian women kept in brothels in the early 20th Century on the west coast and in to the mountain mining towns of the Rockies.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

If the cook book was written in the 1800s, then it was for those that could actually read it; the wealthy. Literacy was not that common back then. The wealthy with domestic help used children that did not go to school so they did not learn how to read.

The treatment of wealthy and poor gets even worse when you go back further in history, which is once again about wealthy merchants and Royalty. It was not pleasant to be poor back then and most people were poor and miserable. They did not live in a manor with servants and cooks.

Edited to add: It is funny to me to watch movies set in medieval times and the chickens are Cinnamon Queens!

Literacy was surprisingly common, outside of portions of the south and southwest. As far as I can tell, the ancestors of at least three of my grandparents were far more often literate than not, back to at least the 1600s. Many Protestants believed one had to be able to read the Bible, even if one did not actually own one. Jewish males had to be able to read Hebrew, and my one Jewish Great-Great-Grandmother apparently wrote letters in Yiddish from Odessa to her son in the United States - we mistakenly believed they were in Hebrew until we had someone who could read them look at them. I don't know what happened to them - they should be put in a museum if they still exist as I have been told that it was very rare for a woman to be able to write, and I gather that she wrote her own letters instead of hiring a scribe.

NYC was one of several cities that ran special night schools for children who worked twelve hour days in factories and then attended classes at night. Both public and church schools were common in much of the country - and the Protestants held that even the poor needed to be able to read the Bible - to this day the second largest parochial school system in the US is the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church.

 

[The Yakima Kid]

My grandparents were sharecroppers. As were their parents. They didn't own slaves, in fact were barely above slaves themselves.

We had a very good family friend who was a Sociology professor, born to poor White southern sharecroppers in the South. When a Black family wanted to live in our college town, they were rejected over and over by landlords. He went out and found them a house. We had a number of people who bragged about their Yankee and New York ancestry who were on the verge of apoplexy when they discovered there were live Black people living inside the city limits.

My mother, who has ancestors who came over on the Mayflower and the Arabella, and who left me eligible for both the DAR and the Canadian Loyalist societies, tended to keep quiet about her fancy ancestors. As an adult, I think it is because she thought that the needlepoint ladies were a batch of narrow minded bigots.

So much for the enlightened "northerners" and the bigoted "southern poor whites."

 

[speckledhen]

AAAAAARGH! Are you aware that bowel cancer used to be a young person's disease in the United States - and still is in Japan? Did not know that.

Bowel cancer became an old person's disease because of the introduction of two chemical additives into cooking fats - BHA and BHT. Not surprised at all, additives/chemicals are killing us all, I'm afraid.

Today's cigarettes have many additives blended into the tobacco to produce an even burn. However, smoking additive free Sherman's is not going to protect you from the bad effects of smoking. Agreed to the MAX!

Moderation is an excellent route. Yup, sure is!

And with that, I'm amazed at how wildly this thread veers off subject, LOL.

I've had all the usual weird comments, the no eggs without a rooster, hens suckling chicks, etc. At the family visit where my SIL asked about how Dottie fed her chicks, my husband's younger brother (dying from emphysema, on oxygen, to segue from the last comments) was standing on my front steps and told me that my rooster was confused. Why? He was crowing in the afternoon.

My other BIL, my SIL's husband, who had just met Deacon the One Spur Wonder and Pocket Penny, even held Penny, immediately spoke up and told him roosters crow all the time, any time. I had to tell him that only Hollywood roosters crow just in the morning.

 

[sunflour]

And with that, I'm amazed at how wildly this thread veers off subject, LOL.

I've had all the usual weird comments, the no eggs without a rooster, hens suckling chicks, etc. At the family visit where my SIL asked about how Dottie fed her chicks, my husband's younger brother (dying from emphysema, on oxygen, to segue from the last comments) was standing on my front steps and told me that my rooster was confused. Why? He was crowing in the afternoon.

My other BIL, my SIL's husband, who had just met Deacon the One Spur Wonder and Pocket Penny, even held Penny, immediately spoke up and told him roosters crow all the time, any time. I had to tell him that only Hollywood roosters crow just in the morning.

The one about no eggs without roosters seems to be quite common, but " hens suckling chicks" …..so funny. Everyone knows the easter bunny does that!